Close Relationships With Temple Leaders Make Ceremony Easier... And Harder

CELEBRATIONS - PASSAGES

June 21, 1996|Valerie Hersch, Special to the Sun-Sentinel

For Rebecca Weiner, celebrating her bat mitzvah with her family at Temple Sinai in Hollywood means more than parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Since her mother is a temple employee, Rebecca has had the opportunity throughout her religious education to develop a closer relationship than most with her rabbi, cantor and other temple leaders.

"It made it easier because I knew everybody so well," she says. Rebecca, 13, an Attucks Middle School seventh grader, became a bat mitzvah on May 11.

Rebecca's mother, Ellen Weiner, is secretary of the Early Childhood and religious schools at Temple Sinai. She says she knows her daughter's close relationship with Rabbi Randall J. Konigsburg and Cantor Bert Kieffer especially added pressure. "The rabbi has known Rebecca since she was an infant," Ellen Weiner explains. "So she knew everyone had a vested interest in her doing a good job. But she really rose to the occasion."

In addition to the regular course of bat mitzvah preparation, Rebecca also has had six years of Hebrew training in religious school. For the last two summers she also has attended Camp Ramah, a Jewish educational sleep-away camp in New England.

Rebecca over the last year has become involved in Temple Sinai's Kadima chapter, a synagogue youth group that has been reinvigorated with the recent addition of a new youth director. She has "made her mark" at the temple by using artistic inclination to help design posters advertising the youth group and its activities, Ellen Weiner explains. Rebecca also incorporated her artistic abilities in her bat mitzvah celebration, designing the graphics for a t-shirt that she gave as a party favor to guests at her bat mitzvah reception.

Celebrating the occasion with Rebecca were her mother and father, Robert, and brothers Evan, 11, and Lee, 9.